Improving patient outcomes in emergency care

SCP Health provides staffing, revenue optimization, and hospital patient care management through a network of 7500+ providers across hospitals in the US.

SCP Health was using a manual, excel-based process to onboard, communicate with, and schedule providers to shifts. Lack of automation and no single source of truth for patient care quality created a heavy operational overhead. Regulatory compliance (e.g., HIPAA) was difficult to track for nondigital channels such as phone calls, text messages, and emails.

Products exist within a context of a system, and it is as important to map out the dependencies as it is to ship features needed for a particular workflow.

We facilitated a Service design exercise and produced a customer lifecycle blueprint. The blueprint clearly articulated areas where software could facilitate self-service, improve efficiency, and lower operational costs via process automation.

The service blueprint mapped:

• the provider lifecycle journey,

• SCP Health back-office processes and dependencies,

• system roles and stakeholders,

• and regulatory impact.

Once the largest pain points were identified with service design, Devbridge facilitated a lean requirements workshop to map the feature epics needed to drive specific business outcomes with the initial release.

Research and data-informed discovery by the Devbridge product team allowed the participants to make informed prioritization decisions that would cater both to the business and the provider (customer) goals.

The first product to launch would be SCP Connect, a mobile and cloud-native platform that would facilitate secure communication between practitioners and schedulers.

Devbridge used iterative delivery paired with micro-funding to validate business assumptions, measure provider adoption, and justify further investment in digital transformation - minimum risk, maximum learning.

Devbridge released the first lightweight product pilot in six weeks. By seven months, additional 12 releases have been shipped across iOS, Android, and cloud-native web apps. With learnings from the field, the team expanded product functionality with workflow management, notifications, scheduling, and more.

A mature infrastructure is a core requirement necessary for a successful digital transformation. We established technical patterns for Infrastructure as Source Code, automated environment management, and built an automated Continuous Delivery pipeline.

The CI/CD pipeline deployed applications directly to iOS and Android app stores, as well as the Azure cloud. Site reliability engineering provided needed reliability, scalability, and infrastructure monitoring for this suite of mission-critical tools.

Devbridge and SCP Health benefited from a multi-year partnership that is founded on alignment around business outcomes. While in the early days, analytics enabled the teams to make informed decisions on priorities, timelines, and investments, the current implementation is monitoring specific process outcomes, for example, the number of shifts that are automatically filled using the mySCP suite of products, profitability of a practice, patient outcomes, and more.